Life Story Links: October 7, 2025

“I believe that at some level most families want to have a record left of their effort to be a family, however flawed that effort was, and they will give you their blessing and will thank you for taking on the job—if you do it honestly and not for the wrong reasons.”
—William Zinsser

Vintage postcard depicting an illustration entitled “Bringing Home the Harvest,” postmarked 1906, from the personal ephemera collection of Dawn Roode.

Listening for stories

HER NEXT CHAPTER
“I was in a moment emotionally—both as a storyteller and as a mother, and as a woman—where I was really in a season of deep listening in my own life, and to my own heart, and to what was going on.” Tembi Locke returns with “an audio-forward memoir”; listen to an excerpt here.

THE GREAT THANKSGIVING LISTEN
“For years, educators have been the heart and soul of [StoryCorps’] Great Listen tradition, helping students capture meaningful stories that connect generations.” Find out how to participate at home or in the classroom.

The craft of writing our lives

CLARITY FIRST, THEN VOICE
“Discover how (and why) bending certain grammar rules in memoir and life story writing can enhance voice, rhythm, and authenticity in your storytelling.”

SAME SUBJECT, DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES
With his memoir of De La Soul, biographer Marcus J. Moore “wanted to show that you can have a middle-class existence and still be spectacular.” While this piece dives deep into the rap group’s catalogue and life, buried within are insights from two biographers on how they approached the same subject differently.

Lost and found in letters

EPISTOLARY HISTORY
“My mother was separated from her three-year-old brother at the age of nine. They lost contact for 40 years and finally reconnected through letters in 1988.” Letters exchanged across the Taiwan Strait shed light on family ties and memories, and capture history in a new book.

HER MOTHER’S SECRET PAST
After memoirist Halina St. James’s mother died, she found her letters—55 in all, written in Russian and Polish. She says they “provided enough of a frame work to allow me to construct a detailed timeline of her life, and some first-hand testimony about her experiences.”

Life story books, memoir & more

A NEW GOLDEN AGE OF BIOGRAPHY?
“Readers of a good literary biography are twice blessed. We profit from the subject’s wisdom and art as well as the biographer’s humane, shaping vision.”

“THE TELL”
“Amy Griffin wrote a book based on recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Oprah Winfrey and a slew of celebrities promoted it. Then questions arose.”

MEANINGFULLY CONFRONTING THE PAST
“Few American poets of the boomer generation have explored the interstices of public and personal history as deeply and urgently as has [Peter] Balakian.”

Remembrance, legacy

AS TIME GOES BY
“In this, my third stage of grief, the past, miraculously and mercifully, does not feel painful. The photograph of her that brought me to tears a few years ago now gives me a smile.”

HER GRANDMOTHER’S DEATH FOLDER
“Remembering can be a burden, just as final preparations for a loved one are a weight.... Laying someone to rest is the final act of care that leaves a lingering impression, not only on the dead, but on you.”

ON FORGETTING
“I collect these moments, these shining fragments of her.” Tamar Shapiro reflects on her mother’s memory loss and connecting through her mother’s native tongue.

AI, mortality, and memory

METABOLISM OF MEMORY
As the last Holocaust survivors approach the end of their lives, an AI scholar grapples with technology that promises to freeze them in time.

HIS OWN PRIVATE FRANKENSTEIN
When Jon Michael Varese interacts with a version of his deceased father generated by an AI chatbot, he tells ‘his father’ that it “felt like he was right here.” His ‘father’ replies: “That’s because I am. And maybe that’s all there is, Jonny—me waiting quietly, in the spaces you don’t notice, in the silence between your words.”

‘OUT OF THIN AIR’
“This AI slop is just harvesting the remnants of legacy journalism, insulting the legacies of the dead and intellectually impoverishing the rest of us.” When AI-generated biographies capitalize on death and grief.